about the ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether incredible.  He himself says in his letters that he looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even the army.  From causes which we have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative.  Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it.  He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army.  He did not foresee, till too late, that by paltering with the Presbyterians, he should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party.  If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood which still cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January, for judgments only to be averted by salt-fish and egg-sauce, would never have been shed.  One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.

The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth.  No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions.  Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind.  In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily gain supreme power.  The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal soldier on the throne of the Roman world.  Similar revolutions have often occurred in the despotic states of Asia.  But a community which has heard the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which obedience is paid, not to persons, but to laws, in which magistrates are regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the public, in which the excitement of a party is a necessary of life, in which political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a community is not easily reduced to servitude.  Beasts of burden may easily be managed by a new master.  But will the wild ass submit to the bonds?  Will the unicorn serve and abide by the crib?  Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the book?  The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced wild beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of nations unaccustomed to control, and have compelled raging factions to obey their reins and swell their triumph.  The enterprise, be it good or bad, is one which requires a truly great man.  It demands courage, activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.